Honors Courses and Seminars

Gentrification and the Changing Face of Boston

Mondays 6 - 7:15 p.m. (Remote)

Prof. André Robinson and Prof. Meghan Callaghan

Have you noticed that new high-rise condo buildings go up in your neighborhood? Or another frozen yogurt shop or gluten-free restaurant opening up and replacing the local bodega? Is your neighborhood being gentrified? What forces motivate our neighborhoods and city to change, become more expensive, to gentrify, thus potentially causing residents to be displaced? What are the cultural, socio-economic, and health impacts when neighborhoods displace communities within a neighborhood? How do community groups organize themselves and help prevent displacement? This course explores why gentrification happens in urban communities, the impacts of gentrification and how community members organize in response.

Artificial Intelligence

Tuesdays 10 - 11:15 a.m. (In Person)

Prof. Paul Kasili and Prof. Omar Sorno

What are the techniques that enable computers to behave intelligently? What are some of the opportunities, challenges, and problems introduced by the emergence and growth of artificial intelligence? Artificial intelligence (AI) addresses questions at the intersection of many fields, including computer science, economics, bioinformatics, medicine, linguistics, philosophy, and psychology. It is a part of our everyday lives: googling some keywords, speaking into your phone to compose a text, using Facebook's facial recognition to tag people in a photo, playing chess against a computer, and using Google Translate to read a sign that is not in your language--these are all examples of AI in action. There are difficult ethical issues that emerge in relation to AI, such as the ways implicit biases are built into algorithms used to predict crime, the impact of robots on labor in the global economy, and the debate over whether intelligent computers deserve human rights.